The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe

by Richard Rohr

Practice II: All Physical Reality as a Mirror Having looked at the objects of the universe, I find there is no one, nor any particle of one, but has reference to the Soul. —Walt Whitman As I have often said, salvation is not a question of if but when. Once you see with God’s eyes, you will see all things and enjoy all things in proper and full perspective. Some put this off till the moment of death or even afterward (“purgatory” was our strange word for this). Salvation, for me, is simply to have the “mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16), which Paul describes as “making the world, life and death, the present and the future—all your servants—because you belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God” (1 Corinthians 3:22–23). Everything finally belongs, and you are a part of it. This knowing and this enjoying are a good description of salvation. I want to close this book with an extended Mirror Meditation I once wrote. The goal of this meditation is to rewire you—both in your mind and in your body—to see all things in God, and God in all things. I find that if you practice this kind of seeing regularly, it will soon become an entire way of life, in which the natural and physical world can work as a daily mirror for you, revealing parts of yourself that you might not know otherwise, revealing the deep patterns of things and, most of all, showing that what we say about the Christ is true: The outer world is a sacrament of God. Read this meditation slowly, in parts or as a whole. I...